KEY POINTS:
The Herald Perspectives page has recently played host to two common sense notions: that no parent with primary care-giving responsibilities should be forced to work against her or his better judgment in order to pay the bills. And that neither a child's nor a mother's place is unequivocally
in the home.
The question remains as to what forms of public financial support best recognise the extra costs of meeting children's needs.
Bob McCoskrie has asked why the Government pays millions for professionals to care for children, but offers no tax breaks or financial recognition for parents who do it.
The obvious answer is that the Government does compensate parents: about $1.5 billion of family assistance tax breaks are distributed to principal caregivers every year, based on robust evidence that they spend that money on their children.
McCoskrie's querulous question obscures the real issue. Financial support for the care of children is in place but it is highly insecure, because a significant part is conditional on the level of family income and on one or more parents being in 20-30 hours of regular paid work per week.
For the poorest, the amount of support has increased very little under Working for Families. The upshot of all this is that assistance now falls most short where it is most needed - in families whose financial status is already shaky.
Families with heavy, unpaid care-giving workloads, for example sole parent families and those dealing with long-term partner or child disability or illness, are seeing their options narrow and harden, under the prevailing "work first" policy regime.
It's time for a family-friendly, child focused policy which reflects our strong desire to provide a secure and truly inclusive environment for kids: no ifs, no buts, no maybes - and no second chances.
Support needs to be designed to see families through times of illness, economic uncertainty and low employment. It must be both more generous and more flexible, in order to give parents more power to respond to their family's basic requirements.
Anti-DPB campaigner Lindsay Mitchell selectively overlooked unpaid parental work in her arguments in the Herald in support of more mothers joining the workforce. The most pressing need she identified was for women to contribute more to the nation's productivity by joining the economy.
In fact spending time, energy and money on children, whether carried out by mums and dads, by professionals or by the state, is the most productive investment of all, and pays hefty long and short-term dividends. And nothing can be more pressing than a child's unmet need.
Similarly, nothing hampers the nation's productivity like child poverty, which wastes more of a population's potential the more it goes unrelieved. The hidden costs of poverty are enormous.
So are those of unsustainable parental workloads - and never more so than when children depend almost entirely on the finite output of only one parent.
It seems to bode well for our future that we have relatively healthy birth rates for a developed country. However a closer look reveals that the rates are bolstered by the larger families among Maori and Pacific peoples - ironically those more likely to face increasing hardship.
The complex patchwork of support that is currently provided is clearly not working for the poorest families, or in the national interest. Children's needs must take priority in family incomes policy.
We cannot afford to leave our most precious resource vulnerable to the narrow priorities of the labour market, other markets, or blind prejudice. Leaving parents with no real choice but to work if they want to stay out of poverty means that they are too often faced with arranging unsatisfactory arrangements for care of children.
The results are that children are more likely to suffer life-long harm. The evidence shows that financial support needs to be provided directly to all caregivers, because the market doesn't always know best.
We all have great need of people who are prepared to take on the responsibility of caring for children, and we all need present and future governments prepared to value and resource them appropriately.
* Associate Professor Mike O'Brien of Massey University's school of social and cultural studies is an executive member of Child Poverty Action Group.
